The Belief and the Activities of the Muslims - Case Study Example

Running Head: Nation of Islam Nation of Islam: The American Black Muslim Group and the Legacy of Elijah Muhammad Date of Submission I. Introduction Any value-free evaluation of the American Black Muslims as a religious association should start with an unmarked look at religion itself, its history and purpose. The present, pervasive hatred and hostility toward the Black Muslims create such an essential analysis of the origins of religion all the more crucial. Primarily people must ignore the voices of those who strongly believe that the Black Muslims are not actually a religion because the detractors extremely dislike the belief and the activities of the Muslims. Nevertheless, the Mormon Church maintains, among other things, that the Black is subordinate or inferior since he is the progeny of Ham, the accursed son of Noah. Consequently, Negroes are permitted to join the Mormon Church, but are prohibited from high church office. However, nobody will assume the perspective that the Mormons are not a religion (Lomax, 1963). In order to acknowledge the Black Muslims and the Mormons, people must revisit the twisted and primitive path humans and God have traversed hand in hand on the journey to the here and now. This declaration, that God is black and the white race represent the evil spirit, gives the Black Muslims with the similar philosophical problem that has weighed down majority of the religions. The question is “How could a good (black) God create a bad (white) thing” (ibid, 63)? The principle regarding Yakub is the attempt of the Black Muslims to provide a persuasive response to that question. With regard to biological terms, recognizing the Muslim idea that the black person is the original human, they should elaborate on how the black race produced white people. Elijah Muhammad affirms the claim in these terms: “The Caucasian race was created out of the weak of the black race; they are the handiwork of Yakub, a black scientist who rebelled against Allah. Dr. Eric Lincoln is correct when he says that the doctrine of Yakub is the central myth of the Black Muslim movement. But it is also the tenet the Black Muslim seem to know least about” (Lomax, 1963, 64). II. The American Black Muslim Group Remarking in the Pittsburgh Courier, Elijah Muhammad emphasized in these expressions the procedures by which Yakub, the Black scientist create the white race: “Who are the white race? I have repeatedly answered that question in this [column] for nearly the past three years. “Why are they white-skinned?” Answer: Allah (God) said this is due to being grafted from the Original Black Nation, as the Black Man has two germs (two people) in him. One is black and the other brown. The brown germ is weaker that the black germ. The brown germ can be grafter into its last stage, and the last stage is white. A scientist by the name of Yakub discovered this knowledge… 6,645 years ago, and was successful in doing this job of grafting agter 600 years of following a strict and rigid birth control law” (Sales, 1995, 109). As Elijah Muhammad claims, the experiment was an accomplishment, but it also caused the creation of the ‘blue-eyed devils’ that now populate the world and have pitiful physical and moral strength. Muhammad then carries on demonstrating the physical supremacy of the Black people through highlighting the triumphs of Black ballplayers and award combatants. Moreover, he stresses what he refers to as the mediocre morality possessed by the white race through harking back to the gas chambers of Germany, the bombing of Hiroshima, and all the exploitations and oppressions white Southerners and Northerners have inflicted upon the Black population (ibid). However, their documentation of the white race as malignant spirits, one powerless of acting good deeds, lies on more than metaphysical bases. It includes history. To establish their historical argument the Black Muslims separate company with well-known historians of world history. They opened up their claims through creating, with an extent of preciseness, that the Black people in Africa had an urbanized and industrialized civilization at that period that, in Malcolm’s statements, “the white savages of Europe were living in caves and crawling around on their all-fours” (Handlin, 1957, 48). It was the invasion of the white race into Africa that blemished the developed civilizations and carried over slavery to the New World. The downfall of the Black people inhabiting Africa is merely temporary. The white evil spirit was given roughly six thousand years to parade his wickedness and afterwards he was to be exterminated as the black race comes back to power. The white race’s time expired just as the Great War was furious; the Black Muslims overpowered the reality that this was the best opportunity for the prophecy to be fulfilled, nevertheless, white people were destined to annihilate each other, with the dispute that prepares the American stage for the supporters of the respectable Elijah Muhammad (Lomax, 1963). The sole explanation the obliteration of the white race didn’t happened on time, as the Muslims claim, is that exceptionally numerous Black people are all related in some ways with the white, that it is not possible to exterminate the evil race without destroying some of the original humans, or the Negroes. This, therefore, is what Muhammad and Malcolm are proclaiming when they address the lost-found black people in the wastelands of North America. They are in fact claiming that the return of the black race to world dominance is being postponed because of the existence of the American Negro; the white race has been provided with a new special consideration, in fact, not because he is worthy of it but to give the Negro time to split up from those programmed for annihilation (ibid). In this rests the justification underlying Muhammad’s argument about a separate state; this is the reason the Black Muslims with their enormous influence over people are incapable to be involved in any of the present civil rights movements; they are unable to help wrestle for better employment opportunities, better education, or better housing. They are dedicated to separating from the white race as soon as possible; for fear that they share his fate of the fire, which is in no doubt to come later on, but to come in a little while. To cover up the rational and emotional imperfections in such claims as this, the Black Muslims should disseminate an endlessly increasing line. They should preserve the Islamic touch but simultaneously uphold their teaching within American concepts that Negroes can grasp; they should involve Negroes who have a difficulty with English and instead teach them Arabic; they should persuade the most Western of people that they are indeed Arabs (Sales, 1994). Malcolm was asserting that the American Negro, as a Moslem, should create diverse noise from the liberated Moslems of, for instance, Persia, since the American Negro is imprisoned in a cage. The cage, apparently, symbolizes the white civilization; this is the reason the cry of the American Negro Moslem is very regional; this is the reason the Persians would do good to pay homage to Allah in their own means in their own places of worship, as the Black Muslims and Allah have their meeting in a shoddy lecture theater in Los Angeles’ Negro ghetto (ibid). It is in these meetings that Malcolm supplements the historical components to his religious beliefs. Malcolm X carries his message of substance and self-esteem to a group of Negroes who have had insignificant, if any, motivation to feel proud of who they are as a race or as individuals. Their meetings with white people are at all times disagreeable circumstances in which Negroes discover themselves humiliated or rendered powerless. The white race is the people they should interact with every day when they go to work in the factory neighborhood; the people they should go to when the rent is unpaid; the people they should confront when they have to use the services of a pawnshop; the people who knock on the door and sells commodities on credit; the people who purchase the installment document and appears at the front door to collect the payments; the people who obtain employment when they are incapable; the people whom they spot on the television untying dogs to chase Negro children; the people they face as a teacher at schools who does not have compassion towards them and who is frequently disapproving of them. And when Malcolm X mentions the white race is a devil, they shout ‘amen’ since every interaction they have with white people is unpleasant (Sales, 1994). Unnerving as it may be, the Black Muslims have raised their principles and teachings on a group experience shared by all American Negroes. Only few of the people agree to their belief and conviction and condemning of the white race. However, nobody can question the truthfulness of the condemnation on which that certainty lies. III. The Nation of Islam: Here and Now The Black Muslims assume power at a period of moral vacuum, at a time when it appeared definite that the American nation would decline to conform to its own unification law. However, the unexpected new militancy of the Negro has compelled an unplanned meting out of conflicts between the Muslims and the republic; America should substantiate that it is not a nation of white devils or expire. The Black Muslims, on the contrary, should confront the actuality of change in the American culture and lifestyle. The Negro has at all time secretly talked loud and resentfully about the white people. The Black Muslims exposed that talk, on the media, and made it plain and simple for everyone to witness. This was excellent for both the Negro and the white people; it surprised and alarmed white people to know about the Blacks’ judgment and opinion about them for five centuries. Liberated from unbearable anger people discarded the guise of puritan legalism and undergone running into the streets shouting that rebelliousness which is widespread to the primitive group of agitated native American Negroes most definitely are (Lomax, 1963). Therefore, the motivated Negro students who carried on the struggle into the streets, who screamed ‘now or never’, have defied the Black Muslims through introducing the theology of unification. More than 9,000 Black Muslims convened in Washington in September 1994 to share their faith, discover means to popularize their public profile and distinguish themselves from the Nation of Islam pioneered by Louis Farrakhan. Affiliates, all supporters of Imam W. Deen Mohammed, son of the founder of Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad, belong to the millions of Black Muslims living in the United States. The population of the members of the society is continuously growing, as Mohammed and other Muslim authorities claim, yet many people still imagine that they belong to Farrakhan’s group (Broadway, 1994). According to Yahya Abdullah, head of a mosque located in Dallas-Fort Worth area and follower of a council of directors referred to as the shuraa, “We are no longer associated with the old ideas of what was in those days the Nation of Islam. You still hear some of the language today. But it’s not Islam, it’s not the Koran. What we represent are the new ideas that the Prophet Muhammad left” (ibid, para 2). The teachings of Farrakhan and his preachers, Abdullah declared, advances separatism between Blacks and Whites. The new means throw away nationalistic sentiments and accept and embrace all nationalities, all that pleasantly exists in America (Broadway, 1994). Mohammed takes over the leadership of the Nation of Islam after this father died in 1975. The reforms he has imposed involved a move toward Orthodox Sunni Islam, which is observed by a great percentage of the world’s Muslims; a taking apart of the hierarchy; the changing of the organization’s name, calling his members only as Muslims; and summons to whites to join the organization. Farakkhan, a top preacher in the organization, busted with Mohammed in 1978 and chose the name Nation of Islam for his advocates (Sales, 1994). To sum it up then, the state of the Nation of Islam is in a good standing; its population is increasing, its economy is better into the Black, and its foreign affairs, despite the fact that it is pressured and constrained, are better than they have ever been before. Target Word Count: 2000 Actual Word Count: Main Content: 2031 Reference Page: 91 Total Actual Word Count: 2122 References Broadway, B. (1994, September 5). Black Muslims Convene; Group Touts Autonomy from Nation of Islam. The Washington Post . Handlin, O. (1957). Race and Nationality in American Life. Boston: Little Brown. Herskovits, M. (1941). Myth of the Negro Past. New York: Harper & Brothers. Lomax, L. (1963). When the Word is Given: A Report on Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and the Black Muslim World. Cleveland, OH: World Publication Company. Sales, W. (1994). From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Boston: South End Press. Read More